Critical Review by Katherine Duncan-Jones

In the following review, Duncan-Jones calls Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Macbeth an interesting interpretation of the play as contemporary psychodrama.

Gregory Doran's brilliant, though not quite faultless, production is designed for touring. The performance style is so mobile and energetic that it seems as if the players are limbering up to sprint all the way to Tokyo, where they will shortly arrive, as so many soldiers and assassins do in the course of the play, almost too breathless to deliver their urgent messages. The Folio's already short text has been considerably shortened, and it too gallops along, concluding in little over two hours. Major cuts to the final act are particularly crucial in transforming Shakespeare's text from historical melodrama to contemporary psychodrama...